About fifty years ago, our world began to alter itself with the invention of new technologies such as the computer and television. Not only did this seem to bring the world together, but it had an effect that at first doesn’t seem like it would be such a bad thing. Information used to be something that was valuable and “cherished like caviar,” (Shenk 158), but with the epoch of technology and near instantaneous communication, it has become “plentiful and taken for granted like potatoes.” (Shenk 158). On the internet especially, users are bombarded with so much information and knowledge that they begin to feel that it just gets in the way, or as David Shenk says: “data smog” (159).
Yahoo.com is a perfect example of this data smog, being a website that is so information filled that a person could literally spend hours following links and perusing through the various articles on the site. Yahoo! is a website that combines a search engine, news articles, and links to almost every type of service imaginable. Its primary service is as a search engine, which is in itself a gateway to so much data smog that a person can easily be suffocated through this function alone. In doing a search for “apple tree” using the search engine, 22,400,000 results are found. Nobody could ever possibly need that much information about apple trees, nor can one imagine that much information about one topic. The fact that there are so many web pages with the mention of this one particular topic shows how the ease of creating something on the internet has been one of the main contributors to the influx of information in the past couple of decades.
According to Eli M. Noam, in 1991 the average American was subject to 3,000 advertisements a day, as opposed to only 560 twenty years earlier (159). These advertisements are a major portion of data smog in today’s world. Television and radio commercials, billboards, and labels on clothing are some of the main components of this advertisement packed society, and Yahoo! is among the top. Even in the search engine advertisements are shown. All along the right side of the screen are “sponsor results,” all of which are trying to get you to buy something. The yahoo.com homepage is also filled with advertisements for various businesses and services such as Netflix, Herbal Essences, and Scottrade. All of these advertisements on the website add considerably to the “information overload” (159) that users experience while using Yahoo!. As Shenk says, eventually it gets to “the point where it often becomes impossible to determine whether someone is trying to tell you something or merely sell you something.” (160) But even if they are just trying to tell you something, that information they’re trying to give you creates just as much data smog as an advertisement.
But as Shenk says, not all of what makes up data smog is unwanted information, much of it is “information that we pay handsomely for, that we crave.” (159) Yahoo.com is inundated with information in the form of links to specific “sections” of Yahoo! that have a good deal of information about that specific topic. Examples include news, Games, Maps, Movies, Music, Tech, Travel, and the Yellow Pages, and that’s not even half of them. The news section is divided into world and local news, which is automatically looked up once you enter your zip-code. Other sections can give you information for your specific area, such as movies, which gives you the movie listing and times for all the theaters nearest your location, as well as offering you a chance to buy tickets to a show time. The fact that all these sections can be used to give a person information on almost any location in the United States proves just how much information is on the internet.
Yahoo.com is an especially bad contributor to the problem of too much information, as it combines so many types of data smog into one site. Sites like Google.com are not as bad, as they only contain a search engine, and do not contain all the other links and information that Yahoo! has. Our society’s plague of data smog is only a problem that will get worse as methods of communication improve and more information is discovered. As more websites like yahoo.com continue to emerge, it could get to the point where it is almost impossible to find the information you are actually looking for because of the data smog.